Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Is Obama Anti-Semitic?

A poster in Israel

By Alan
Caruba

President
Obama made no secret of his displeasure that Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected
to be Israel’s Prime Minister. Only David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime
Minister and one of the nation’s founders, served longer.

Obama
lives in some parallel universe apart from the lessons of history and the
realities of what is actually occurring. On May 18, 2009, not long after Obama
had been in office and Netanyahu was visiting the White House, Obama was
demanding that he endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze the settlements on
the West Bank.

Considering
that the Palestinians had refused statehood from the day the United Nations
endorsed Israel’s independence that has been a fool’s mission no matter who was
President or Prime Minister.

As for
Obama’s demands about settlements, who is Obama to tell the Israelis in 2009
where and if they can build the housing needed for its growing population? And
yet Netanyahu, seeking to accommodate Obama, endorsed Palestinian statehood
shortly thereafter and then announced a ten-month freeze on settlement
development.

What did
Netanyahu get in return? Nothing.

In 2014
when the Israelis responded militarily to months of rocket attacks from Gaza, it
contacted the Department of Defense to request Hellfire missiles and Obama
reportedly personally blocked the shipments.

The talks
with Iran that have been Obama’s obsession since he took office have continued
despite his promise not to “have talks forever.” This has been his pattern of
behavior since the day he took office. As Wall Street columnist Brett Stephens
observed, “The President collects hard favors from allies and replays them with
neglect and derision. This is the mentality of a peevish and callow potentate.”

Netanyahu’s
speech to a joint meeting of Congress left the White House deeply angered and
his reelection probably stunned them. The Israelis are accustomed to being
underestimated.

At this
point, Obama has given plenty of evidence that he is both pro-Islam and
anti-Israel. Michael Haltman has written a timeline of events, “Obama’s Israel Hatred”, that reflect Obama’s attitudes in terms of the people with whom he
associated before his 2008 run for the presidency and the events that followed
thereafter.

Unspoken,
but widely suspected, is the question of whether Obama is also anti-Semitic. As
Haltman points out “Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of
Israel, from the former Palestine Liberation Organization, Rashid Khalid to
former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Bazinski. Most famously
people became aware of Rev. Jeramiah Wright whose church Obama attended and
where he was married. Wright has been quoted saying “Them Jews ain’t going to
let him talk to me.”

The
question of anti-Semitism is complicated by the fact that Obama has surrounded
himself with Jews in the White House.

The
Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, is Jewish. As is Gene Sperling, the
Director of the National Economic Council. Janet Yellen, the Chairwoman of the
Federal Reserve is Jewish as is a senior advisor, David Plouffe, as well as a
dozen others. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff is Jewish as was his
former senior advisor, David Axelrod. At least fifteen other Jews formerly held
high office in the administration.

For
anti-Semites, that would be “proof” that the White House is “run by Jews”, but
that would not only be absurd, it would ignore the Muslims that Obama has put
into positions of power and influence throughout his administration. Obama's Jewish personnel choices all share his very liberal views.

I define
anti-Semitism as a serious or general dislike of Jews. It can be either overt
or covert. As in most cases in life, you can make your own conclusion based on
a person’s actions, not words.

There is
little doubt, however, that Obama shares an antipathy to Israel that is
widespread among world leaders and many others. After two thousand years, the
reemergence of Israel as a sovereign state in 1948 has no doubt baffled and
irked those who hold Jews in contempt. Up until the election of Obama Israel
had been supported by whoever was in the White House and understood to be an
ally.

Now that
he is in the final years of his presidency, Obama does not have to hide his
antipathy to Israel, nor did he make much effort to do so in this first term.

The White
House suggestion that they might take the two-state issue to the United Nations
Security Council reflects Obama’s pique over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress
opposing the Iran nuclear deal and his reelection. By contrast, his Palestinian
counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, is now in the 11th year of his four-year
term. Who needs elections in Palestine? And the Palestinian Authority is now linked
with Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist group.

Seeking
United Nations involvement is a last ditch effort to harm Israel, but it hardly
matters what the United Nations does or does not do because it is the most
obscenely anti-Israel international institution.

What
troubles most people, irrespective of any real or assumed anti-Israel or
anti-Semitic element, is Obama’s pursuit of a deal with the Iranians that would
permit them at some point to make their own nuclear weapons. It quite simply
makes no sense to anyone except Obama. Iran has made no secret of its wish to “wipe
Israel off the map.” Netanyahu left no
doubt that Israel would use military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons
facilities. In the past they destroyed such facilities in Iraq and Syria.

As for the
Iranians, they don’t care how the negotiations turn out. They have gotten a
respite from the sanctions and had funds that were frozen returned; securing money and time to continue their nuclear ambitions.

A

s for the
destruction of Israel, Iran has both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza as
their proxies to threaten Israel, so they can wait for a nuke to finish off the
job. And who did the U.S. just remove from its list of terrorist nations and
groups? Iran and Hezbollah!

I suspect
that once Obama returns to civilian life, we will learn more about his views about
race and religion. What we have learned at this point is that he doesn’t like
an America that is a world power and the leader of the free world. His policy
of retreat has caused allies and enemies alike to distrust him.

Anti-Semitic?
Anti-Israel? Regrettably his words and actions demonstrate that this can be
said of Obama with relative ease.

4 comments:

Alan,We had plenty of warnings about Obama's past, his choice of friends, his sketchy biography and his political mentors. It should be no surprise that he is a far left liberal (socialist) and anti Semite. James Corsi's book 'An Obama Nation' gave us plenty of warnings but no one believed him because the voters wanted a black liberal president.

Barack Obama--alias Barry Soetoro--is not anti- anything, except anything that would reveal him for what he really is: A pathological liar (it is all he really knows how to do, all he studied so hard to be all his life), who has no true character. Read Shelby Steele's book, "A Bound Man" (Steele also had a black father and a white mother, but they taught him far better than Obama's worthless parents, and early and later Muslim influences, did Obama).

And I have always understood "semitic" to refer to both Jews and Arabs (and, my 4-inch Webster's International dictionary adds, ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Aramaeans, Canaanites, and Phoenicians).

Anyway, Bruce AB is right, we had plenty of warnings. The American electorate (and elsewhere, around the world, it is clear to me) don't know how to judge character, even the total lack of it. (Well, it's perhaps more correct to say, a lot of them just don't want to let go of their pet ideologies--dogmas--when choosing a "leader".)

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.